Embracing change: Navigating shifting landscapes with compassion and agency
This video is featured in the PDI 2026 playlist.
Summary
Key Insights
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User research is not declining but evolving and remains crucial for understanding human experience.
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Researchers should view AI as a tool to augment, not replace, their work.
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Building strong partnerships with business stakeholders by understanding their language is essential to increasing research influence.
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Collaboration within and beyond organizations strengthens skills and advances the discipline.
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Ethical interrogation of AI, including biases and socioeconomic impacts, is a unique opportunity for user researchers.
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Applying empathy inward towards colleagues helps build trust and fosters more open, effective collaboration.
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Tools like Dovetail can help speed up research synthesis, freeing researchers for more strategic work.
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Communicating research value effectively means aligning insights with business needs and decision-making frameworks.
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Embracing uncertainty and challenging the status quo are inherent parts of impactful user research.
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The analogy of surgeons using robotic arms illustrates that expertise remains fundamental even as research methods incorporate AI.
Notable Quotes
"User research is not going anywhere. It isn’t a sinking vessel in need of saving."
"There’s an African proverb that says if you wanna go fast, you go alone. But if you wanna go far, go together."
"AI is the new electricity, transforming multiple industries much like electricity powered the industrial revolution."
"The tools that are AI inspired will not replace those who understand how they work or apply complex skills requiring human creativity and judgment."
"We’re trading empathy for algorithms… Personalization has gotten so complex that it’s now out of human control."
"Turn ethnography inward and learn how your peers and leaders make decisions before you try to use data to influence those decisions."
"Meeting partners where they are and folding what they understand into how we connect with them is how we can show influence."
"Sometimes people aren’t willing, and you get a whole lot more with honey than you do with vinegar."
"Navigating uncertainty is part of our work; uncertainty actually becomes a catalyst we didn’t think we needed."
"Surgeons don’t stop healing people because they’re assisted by robot arms. We get new tools to support us and need to learn how to use them."
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